Guarding the Border:
On the technological threshold of human and unhuman

Instructor: Allen Feldman Date & Time: Saturday, May 16, 23, 30, June 6, 13, 20, 27, July 4 2 - 4:30 PM ET

DESCRIPTION: Today’s war on terror, refugees, migrant labor, minorities and the immunocompromised mediate what counts and does not count as human. This process is activated through images of humanity’s alters and antagonists; all those bodies which lack humanity and consequently define the human through excommunication. The monstrous, grotesque and the unhuman political technologies cannot mask and distort a determining political reality lying behind such images but are in themselves formative and structuring forces by which an order and dis-order of bodies are crafted in acts of political speciation. In this Seminar, we will engage the core concepts and methods of a materialist media archeology of the body as a counter history of the present. We will retrieve the submerged layers of sensory and spatio-temporal practice embedded in the biopolitical body and its technological unconscious. The Seminar will navigate and interface multiple foundational genealogies of the mediological and political body:

Genealogy 1) Aristolean-slave prosthetics, Hegelian Master/Slave dialectics and the rabble, Lacanian mirroring decorporeality, Fanonian bodily colonialism, Wilderson’s Afropessimism and Derrida’s beast and the sovereign;

Genealogy 2) Nietzsche’s punition and somatic memory, Hertz’ death and the right hand, Mauss’ techniques of the body, Foucault’s scopic regimes, Agamben’s anthropological machine, Benjamin’s Unmensch, Esposito’s and Derrida’s auto-immunity;

Genealogy 3) Stoic incorporeality, Marx’s Fragment on the Machine, Sohn-Rethel’s broken machinic bodies, Canguillhem’s monstrosity and the abnormal, Simondon’s transindividuation, Deleuze’s optico-tactile equilibrium, Stiegler’s retentional incorporeal prosthetics;

Genealogy 4) Uexküll’s biosemiotics, Heidegger’s animal impoverishment, Arendt’s animal de-natality, Levinas’ defacement of animality, Derrida’s carnophallagocentrism and zoo-anarchism.

Image: Paratroopers patrol local villages, gather biometric data

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.